In our last post we announced Octicons, our new icon font. We put a lot of work into the font and gained a lot of knowledge in the process. With five different designers working to make it happen, this was one of our bigger collaborations. We thought we'd detail how we built Octicons and what we learned along the way.

Icon fonts are awesome. Other than the fact that they have to be single color, they are superior to using images as icons in every way. But which do you choose? There are loads of different sets out there. I'm going to attempt to round them all up here and keep this updated (this post has already been updated several times).

Olympukes is a collection of 52 icons depicting the true spirit of the Olympics.
This pictogram font is offered free for personal use only and will be released on 13th of August, the occasion of the Athens Olympics 2004.

Entypo is a set of 250+ carefully crafted pictograms. The package contains an icon font — OpenType, TrueType and @font-face — EPS, PDF and PSD files. All released for free under the license CC BY-SA 3.0.

Every single icon matches a particular key on your keyboard – for example, the lower caps of the basic Latin alphabet form the more popular social icons in a circle, while the representations in capital letters of the same alphabet show them without the circle formation – in their pure form (you can find a detailed tutorial depicted on the last image of the presentaton).
The social icons font is very convenient and easy to use for web design in
themes, page layouts etc, as well as for every type of print or offline design. Have fun!

Modern Pictograms is a typeface for interface designers and programmers. Designed in early 2011 for the Flatfile Wordpress theme, the pictograms stay sharp when used large or small. Install the OpenType file for Photoshop mockups and drop in the @font-face code into your CSS to embed them right in your Web page. Designed to work on web sites at sizes down to 18 pixels, but best at higher than 24 pixels.

2011

Japanese graphic designer Masaaki Hiromura has made pictograms an integral part of the kanji characters he created for Tokyo’s Kitasenjyu Marui department store to come up with food words that can be understood in any language. The silhouette of the food appropriately replaces a stroke in the word so it can be read as text. Although Hiromura was probably focused on devising a witty and graphically interesting way to communicate to multinational customers who frequent the store, this display seems like the reverse of how written languages began in many ancient cultures. Japanese and Chinese characters started as pictographs, ideographic symbols describing objects and actions. Over time, these characters became less pictographic and ideographic and more visually abstract. What’s amusing about these pictogram characters is that we’ve come full circle.

2006

Dangergraphics is the online portfolio for Jason Csizmadi. Jason Csizmadi a designer with over 8 year of experience in interactive design. Dangergraphics specializes in clean, beautiful and powerful interactive design.